The white man exclaimed with horror:
“In God’s name stop!”
“Is not the heart of Donald Payne filled with hate for the man who has filled his life with suffering?”
“Yes, Natachee, I hate George Clinton.”
“But you will not take the revenge that I, Natachee, have planned for you?”
“No—No—No!”
“The heart of a white man is a strange thing,” returned the Indian. “I, Natachee, cannot understand.”
The sun was not yet above the mountains, but the sky was glorious with the beauty of the new day, when Hugh Edwards stood in the doorway of the Indian’s hut.
Against a sky of liquid gold, melting into the deeper blue above, wreaths of flaming crimson cloud mists were flung with the careless splendor of the Artist who paints with the brush of the wind and the colors of light on the canvas of the heavens. The man bared his head and, with face uplifted, watched.
He felt the soft breath of the spring on his cheek and caught the perfume of cedar and pine. He heard the birds singing among the blossoms on the mountain side. He saw the mighty peaks and crags towering high. He looked down upon the foothills and mesas and afar over the desert where gray-blue shadows drifted on a sea of color into the far purple distance. A squirrel, in a live oak near by, chattered a glad good morning. A buck stepped from the cover of a manzanita thicket and stood, for a moment, with antlered head lifted, as if he too sensed the beauty and the meaning of life. A timid doe came to stand beside her lordly mate. The man, motionless, held his breath. In a flash they were gone.